Is class a factor in identifying some veteran as an English national treasure? Well, class is always a factor in that country. But its national treasures can come from any point on the spectrum.
Kathy Burke, London Irish, of working-class stock, is unquestionably among their number. Dame Joanna Lumley, born in India to Maj James Rutherford Lumley, is unquestionably another. Endless middle-class stars in sitcom cardigans have also achieved English-national-treasure status.
The conversation arises as two elegantly complementary male contenders make their way again into our cinemas. I am here today to argue for Hugh Grant and Danny Dyer as the great English national treasures of contemporary culture.
The lion and the unicorn? Not quite. Traditionally the former is England and the latter Scotland. So, two other beings that represent different ways of being unmistakably English.
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Not Capt Mainwaring and Sgt Wilson either. Those two Dad’s Army characters united the aspiring lower middle and the upper middle. More Sgt Wilson and crafty Pte Walker. Both a bit untrustworthy on-screen. Both a bit subversive. But in very different ways.
You know where you can find Hugh Grant. The great man is back as Daniel Cleaver in the unnecessarily excellent Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy. Jonesy’s sometime pursuer appears to have lost the Mephistophelian strain to his personality and aged into what we are required to call a roué. Bridget now rolls her eyes and smiles when he attempts risqué jokes in front of the children.
What has not changed is the bearing of a character who – this sounds right for Daniel – went to school with a future archbishop of Canterbury and half a dozen Lloyd’s names. The lugubrious delivery is that of a man who knows his listener is required to hear him out.
Danny Dyer cannot blame us for setting him in opposition to Grant. After all, he does so himself in the splendid trailer for Nick Love’s incoming Marching Powder. “I know what you’re thinking,” he says. “You’ve come to the cinema to see a movie star, bit of romance, leading man, dashing geezer with a chiselled jaw and a six-pack. Bit of Hugh Grant.”
He’s not finished with the Grant references.
“Four Weddings and a Funeral. Room with a View. Bridget Jones’s Diary. Love Actually. Well, f**k all that. I’m Danny Dyer, and this is Marching Powder.”
It is indeed. A rambunctious montage follows that lays out the story of a typically Dyerian (Dyeresque?) character attempting rehabilitation after being found guilty of the things he habitually gets up to in Nick Love films. “Fighting at football. Possession of cocaine. At your age?” the judge sputters. “Don’t you feel the slightest bit embarrassed?”
He has six weeks to get himself together.
“What am I going to do while you’re out?” he asks his wife.
“What you normally do,” she replies. “Wank and play Fifa.”
This looks awesome.
Grant and Dyer have, of course, taken very different routes to either side of a thin fence at the top of the hill. You can learn about Dyer’s journey from east London in a singular memoir (as he almost certainly wouldn’t call it) entitled Straight Up.
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He gets in a spot of bother, but his heart isn’t really in it. “I don’t really think crime was for me,” he writes. He landed a part in Prime Suspect 3. He did hard-nosed films for Love that included The Football Factory and The Business. In the past 15 years he has ended up (inevitably) in EastEnders and, excellent in the job, as host of the quizshow The Wall.
Seven years his senior, Hugh John Mungo Grant made his way to the English-national-treasure pavilion via grammar school, New College, Oxford, and Four Weddings and a Funeral. There was, in the mid-1990s, a spot of bother with a sex worker, but, by the time of the Weinstein revelations, scandals involving consensual sex seemed like the stuff of another century (as indeed they then were).
In recent years he has become an oak of his generation, demonstrating exquisite timing in Paddington 2, A Very English Scandal and Heretic. Nobody now pretends he is anything other than a master of light comedy.
Every country has a class system. Every country other than England pretends that it doesn’t. The divisions are not what they were, but they remain sufficiently stark for it to be madness to imagine them not there.
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“Would it work for me to drastically change and become some kind of Hugh Grant-type actor?” Dyer said more than a decade ago. No more than it would make sense for Grant to swing a pool cue in a Nick Love film.
But we desperately need to see the two great English national treasures on the same screen. It worked for Joanna Lumley and Kathy Burke.
Marching Powder is in cinemas from Friday, March 7th
